Lorna simpson photography style

Lorna Simpson

Born in Brooklyn, Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the 1990s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Simpson’s early work—particularly her striking juxtapositions of text and staged images—raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history that continue to drive the artist’s expanding and multi-disciplinary practice today. She deftly explores the medium’s umbilical relation to memory and history, both central themes within her work.

Studying on the West Coast in the mid-1980s, Simpson was part of a generation of artists who utilized conceptual approaches to undermine the credibility and apparent neutrality of language and images. Her most iconic works from this period depict African-American figures as seen only from behind or in fragments. Photographed in a neutral studio space, the figures are tied neither to a specific place nor time. Drawing upon a long-standing interest in poetry and literature, the artist accompanies these images with her own fragmented text, which is at times infused with the suggestion

Lorna Simpson received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. When Lorna Simpson emerged from the graduate program at San Diego in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. Feeling a strong need to re-examine and re-define photographic practice for contemporary relevance, Simpson was producing work that engaged the conceptual vocabulary of the time by creating exquisitely crafted documents that are as clean and spare as the closed, cyclic systems of meaning they produce. Her initial body of work alone helped to incite a significant shift in the view of the photographic art’s transience and malleability.

Lorna Simpson first became well-known in the early 1990s for her large- scale photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory. With unidentified figures as a visual point of departure, Simpson uses the figure to examine the ways in which gender and culture shape the interactions, relationsh

Lorna Simpson

American photographer and multimedia artist

For the singer, see Lorna Simpson (singer).

Lorna Simpson

Simpson in April 2009

Born

Lorna Simpson


(1960-08-13) 13 August 1960 (age 64)

Brooklyn, New York

NationalityAmerican
EducationUniversity of California-San Diego, MFA, 1985; School of Visual Arts, New York City, BFA, 1983
Known forPhotography, Film, Video
MovementConceptual photography
Awards2010 ICP Infinity Award in Art, International Center of Photography, New York City; 2019 J. Paul Getty Medal

Lorna Simpson (born August 13, 1960) is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale.[1] She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation.[2] Simpson continues to explore thes

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